DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus America rolls on...to the grave

Ok. And?

And I am enjoying watching you Liberal/Progressive Democrats beginning to eat your own.

Couple things.. if Trump is too distracted to run the country and GOP is too dysfunctional to get anything passed.. how are they running the country into the ground?

Second, citing that a significant strong period in the stock market is beginning to level out is a bit disingenuous.. did anybody really expect it to up by 9% every 6 months forever?

You never did explain who would save them if China decided they wanted the Pacific Rim and the US was not around.

Canada?

DT is great for zombie threads. No matter what happens, it just won't die.

I also thought 40's opinion about nobody handling a Russian invasion was a bit off. As while sure, the US can handle it on our own, it will NEVER be handled by just one country, if it ever happened.

40 doesn't understand how basic military alliances between countries work.

40 doesn't understand how basic military alliances between countries work.

This isn't back in the day.

Back in the day they burnt witches at the stake and threw [censored] and poop out of their window.

Swish knows nothing of History.

Back in the day, England's Navy was so powerful it would sail the world and when it came across a place it wanted, it would send an emissary into the capitol with a letter stating "The King of England is interested in your country and now claims it as his own. You could fight and die but it would still belong to England.

The British sold opium to the Chinese until it all but destroyed Chinese society so the Chinese passed a law against opium sales and use punishable by death.
The Brits said, oh no you don't and the Navy began to flatten one of their coastal cities, block by block until China dropped the law.

If Their was no US, China or Russia alone could do the same.

Nations of the Pacific Rim...

Japan.
North Korea.
South Korea.
Hong Kong.
Macau.
Taiwan.
Southeast Asia.
Philippines.
Vietnam.
Cambodia.
Thailand.
Malaysia.
Singapore.
Brunei.
Indonesia.
East Timor.

Which of these do you say would stop China if China wanted them as Russia went after Europe and there was no US?

ok, I'm done.

Got a bag of hammers that needs filling.

As said before...NATO. The UN. And China having any semblance of political and economic sense.

The world is not a game of Risk or Civilization.

And sorry, what European countries did Russia take over? And when?

We were talking about if the US did not exist so it would be NATO without the US taking on Russ.....

Ugh, back to filling the bag of hammers.

We were talking about if the US did not exist so it would be NATO without the US taking on Russ.....

Don’t forget how the Soviet Union saved the world from Hitler

By Ishaan Tharoor May 8, 2015

People look at photos on the "We have won!" memorial panel in Stavropol, Russia May 5, 2015. The panel shows the famous Soviet picture "Flag above the Reichstag" made from 4,222 portraits of defenders of their Motherland during the World War II from Stavropol, local media reported. REUTERS/Eduard Korniyenko
In the Western popular imagination -- particularly the American one -- World War II is a conflict we won. It was fought on the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima, through the rubble of recaptured French towns and capped by sepia-toned scenes of joy and young love in New York. It was a victory shaped by the steeliness of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the moral fiber of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and the awesome power of an atomic bomb.

[What V-E Day was like in London for a U.S. airman on leave from the war]

But that narrative shifts dramatically when you go to Russia, where World War II is called the Great Patriotic War and is remembered in a vastly different light.

Play Video 1:28
Putin presides over Victory Day parade
Russian President Vladimir Putin greeted global leaders arriving for the military parade on Red Square in Moscow marking the 70th anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany. (Reuters)
On May 9, Russian President Vladimir Putin will play host to one of Moscow's largest ever military parades to mark the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany. More than 16,000 troops will participate, as well 140 aircraft and 190 armored vehicles, including the debut of Russia's brand new next-generation tank.


It's a grand moment, but few of the world's major leaders will be in attendance. The heads of state of India and China will look on, but not many among their Western counterparts. That is a reflection of the tense geopolitical present, with Putin's relations with the West having turned frosty after a year of Russian meddling in Ukraine. When Russia's T-14 Armata tank broke down at a parade rehearsal on Thursday, the snickering could be heard across Western media.


Russian soldiers are pictured next to the Reichstag building in this undated photo taken May 1945 in Berlin. (REUTERS/MHM/Georgiy Samsonov/Handout via Reuters )
Unfairly or not, the current tensions obscure the scale of what's being commemorated: Starting in 1941, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and played perhaps the most important role in the Allies' defeat of Hitler. By one calculation, for every single American soldier killed fighting the Germans, 80 Soviet soldiers died doing the same.

Of course, the start of the war had been shaped by a Nazi-Soviet pact to carve up the lands in between their borders. Then Hitler turned against the U.S.S.R.

[What one Soviet soldier saw when he entered Auschwitz.]


The Red Army was "the main engine of Nazism’s destruction," writes British historian and journalist Max Hastings in "Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945." The Soviet Union paid the harshest price: though the numbers are not exact, an estimated 26 million Soviet citizens died during World War II, including as many as 11 million soldiers. At the same time, the Germans suffered three-quarters of their wartime losses fighting the Red Army.

"It was the Western Allies’ extreme good fortune that the Russians, and not themselves, paid almost the entire ‘butcher’s bill’ for [defeating Nazi Germany], accepting 95 per cent of the military casualties of the three major powers of the Grand Alliance," writes Hastings.

Play Video 2:57
See Moscow celebrating victory over Nazi Germany in 1945
Moscow will host on Saturday one of Russia's largest ever military parades, marking the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany. This footage show the victory parade on Red Square in 1945. (AFP)
The epic battles that eventually rolled back the Nazi advance -- the brutal winter siege of Stalingrad, the clash of thousands of armored vehicles at Kursk (the biggest tank battle in history) -- had no parallel on the Western Front, where the Nazis committed fewer military assets. The savagery on display was also of a different degree than that experienced farther west.


Hitler viewed much of what's now Eastern Europe as a site for "lebensraum" -- living space for an expanding German empire and race. What that entailed was the horrifying, systematic attempt to depopulate whole swaths of the continent. This included the wholesale massacre of millions of European Jews, the majority of whom lived outside Germany's pre-war borders to the east. But millions of others were also killed, abused, dispossessed of their lands and left to starve.


Russian soldiers are pictured on top of the Reichstag building in this undated photo taken May 1945 in Berlin.(REUTERS/MHM/Georgiy Samsonov/Handout via Reuters)
"The Holocaust overshadows German plans that envisioned even more killing. Hitler wanted not only to eradicate the Jews; he wanted also to destroy Poland and the Soviet Union as states, exterminate their ruling classes, and kill tens of millions of Slavs," writes historian Timothy Snyder in "Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin."

By 1943, the Soviet Union had already lost some 5 million soldiers and two-thirds of its industrial capacity to the Nazi advance. That it was yet able to turn back the German invasion is testament to the courage of the Soviet war effort. But it came at a shocking price.


In his memoirs, Eisenhower was appalled by the extent of the carnage:

When we flew into Russia, in 1945, I did not see a house standing between the western borders of the country and the area around Moscow. Through this overrun region, Marshal Zhukov told me, so many numbers of women, children and old men had been killed that the Russian Government would never be able to estimate the total.

To be sure, as Snyder documents, the Soviet Union under Stalin also had the blood of millions on its hands. In the years preceding World War II, Stalinist purges led to the death and starvation of millions. The horrors were compounded by the Nazi invasion.

"In Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Belarus, and the Leningrad district, lands where the Stalinist regime had starved and shot some four million people in the previous eight years, German forces managed to starve and shoot even more in half the time," Snyder writes. He says that between 1933 and 1945 in the "bloodlands" -- the broad sweep of territory on the periphery of the Soviet and Nazi realms -- some 14 million civilians were killed.

By some accounts, 60 percent of Soviet households lost a member of their nuclear family.

For Russia's neighbors, it's hard to separate the Soviet triumph from the decades of Cold War domination that followed. One can also lament the way the sacrifices of the past inform the muscular Russian nationalism now peddled by Putin and his Kremlin allies. But we shouldn't forget how the Soviets won World War II in Europe.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worl...m=.92373db7df39

Yeah it's pretty pathetic that this country is being led by an administration with their very own home boys at the reins of a GOP controlled House and Senate and still can't get healthcare or tax reform done or even so much as walk and chew gum at the same time.

Who Knew?

Please, they had 8 years to come up with a plan together, but they didn't.

How much more time does the GOP need? Another 8?

They were he party of no for 8 years straight. And now they have full control, yet just say no to each other.

Call it "diversity" all you want, the majority of Americans know that's a load of crap. They simply aren't good at their jobs. The GOP had years to get on the same page.

Stop making excuses.